more or less

This past March was a big one for me professionally. I spoke at two SharePoint Saturdays, Charlotte and Richmond, I had a huge migration project that was completed (mostly) which involved late nights and one weekend. To cap it all off, I accepted a full time position with the client I've been consulting with for sixteen months – the Carolinas HealthCare System. I started this week as their SharePoint Architect.

First, I want to talk about my experience speaking at SharePoint Saturday – in short, it was great. I want to publically thank both organizations for allowing me to speak and being great hosts. I've done presentations before for work and I spoke once before at a Microsoft hosted mini conference (wow, that must have been three or four years ago and it was about IE8), but this was my first time speaking at a community hosted event/conference. I really appreciated how well organized they were the day of the conference. I enjoyed my experience so much that I volunteered to speak at another event coming up, the Carolina Code Camp here in Charlotte in early May.

Probably the biggest accomplishment for March was the SharePoint migration project at work. We moved several hundred gigs of data, spread out over 4500+ sites/subsites. We did some reorganization, splitting up one huge site collection into 330, while moving another 50 site collections. We also applied branding and turned on the SharePoint 2010 user interface for the first time. (We had migrated from 2007 to 2010 last year, but left the 2007 UI turned on) We also trained several hundred site owners and introduced strong governance. We have a lot of work to do, but we're off to great start.

Given how much I've enjoyed working as a consultant for Carolinas HealthCare System (CHS), I decided to accept their offer for a full time position as a SharePoint Architect. We have executive support, a crucial element, which has allowed us to build both a great infrastructure and a great team. I'm particularly excited about the opportunity to help define how things are going to work, technically in the SharePoint environment as well as the business processes that we do as a team. Things like how we process incoming requests for solutions, what services we're going to offer, plus what tools we're going to build to help our forty thousand plus users solve problems in their workday.

One other thing I should say, in the context of the new job. I'm leaving behind a great organization – Cardinal Solutions. I've been a consultant with them for a few years now and they've been very good to me and I will continue to refer anyone looking for a consulting gig to Cardinal. This career move for me was all about the opportunity I was going to and was nothing negative about Cardinal.